1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing technologies for performing various types of processing on multimedia content.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, high-quality content made of images, audio, and the like and supplied as digital data has been supplied, and multimedia content including the mixed content has been circulated. In particular, due to the widespread use of the Internet, which is a global-scale network, in the past few years, such content can be easily available for pleasure.
Furthermore, due to development in infrastructures for circulation and transmission of information, even individuals can transmit information. Also, transmission of various types of multimedia content including moving images, audio, and the like is becoming possible. In order to create such content, for example, technologies for easily editing and processing moving images photographed with video cameras are required.
In order to easily edit and process moving image data, audio data, and the like without troubling users, computers are required to automatically recognize content. However, it is naturally very difficult for computers to automatically recognize the details of information, such as moving images having a large amount of information that change over time.
For document data or the like, which is one type of digital data, it is not difficult for computers to determine a part including a designated character or word. However, it is technologically very difficult for computers to understand the details expressed using moving images, audio, and the like.
Thus, in order to easily recognize such multimedia content made of moving images, still images, audio, and the like, a method for providing, as metadata, linguistic information including the details and features of the multimedia content described using a keyword, an explanatory note, or the like or non-linguistic information including the features of the multimedia content described using an image or audio in a format that is easily processed by computers is adopted. Also, compatibility of the format of metadata itself is being achieved by means of MPEG-7 or the like.
In other words, in order to easily perform retrieval, editing, and the like on enlarged multimedia content, instead of understanding the details of the large content, the features and characteristics of the multimedia content are held inside or outside the content as metadata, and such information is used to realize a function to easily edit multimedia content.
A central processing apparatus determining the details of content in accordance with the property and conditions by using an object (data) and a property (metadata) in order to perform load distribution in a case where an object-oriented data management system is used is disclosed as an example. The processing apparatus is capable of instructing appropriate processing to an appropriate processing part.
However, using metadata in editing multimedia content, as described above, causes the problems described below.
First, since a wide variety of metadata exists, all the information processing apparatuses cannot recognize metadata when editing multimedia content. Thus, if editing is performed on multimedia content without recognizing metadata, the metadata is not copied to the edited multimedia content. Consequently, metadata cannot be used for edited multimedia content.
Second, even if information processing apparatuses can recognize metadata when editing multimedia content, in a case where the multimedia content is changed in accordance with the editing, the metadata is inappropriate as metadata indicating a property of the changed multimedia content. Thus, the metadata cannot be correctly used for the edited multimedia content.
In other words, the known technologies described above cause a problem in that metadata cannot be correctly used due to editing of multimedia content.